1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to storage area networks. More specifically, the present invention relates to methods and apparatus for efficiently accessing data in a storage area network.
2. Description of Related Art
In a storage area network such as a fibre channel network, data associated with a variety of hosts connected to the storage area network is maintained on a variety of persistent storage devices such as disks that are located throughout the network. A host may or may not be aware of the variety of persistent storage devices in the network. By using a variety of persistent storage devices, features such as mirroring, striping, and concatenation can be implemented. To allow access to the variety of persistent storage devices while still maintaining relative interface simplicity in a host, layers of abstraction and virtualization are used to allow a host to read and write data to a single entity. A fibre channel switch then translates and maps read and write access to the single entity to a variety of persistent storage devices in the fibre channel network to allow implementation of features such as mirroring, striping, and concatenation. However, accessing persistent storage devices through the layers of virtualization has been inefficient.
It is therefore desirable to provide methods and apparatus for improving data access in fibre channel networks using layer of virtualization.